Kathleen Diffley and Coleman Hutchison (eds). The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction

Abstract

In his essay near the end of this volume, Cody Marrs tackles the elephant in the room. Interest in the Civil War, he reminds us, has traditionally come across as a white male affair, the domain of the ‘buff’, who knows things about regiments. Study of the period has suffered. It can feel like something wrapped up and done, only to be talked about as a kind of competitive trivia. How many troops were on the Union Right Flank at Gettysburg? Who commanded the Iron Brigade? What, for a bonus point, is a parrot gun? The editors of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction deftly shut the lid on this from the very start. It is not often that an academic book can make a viable case for its existence before page one, but here is one that might have done it. In the prefatory material we are offered a chronology. It begins predictably enough with the US-Mexican War and the pattern of political strife and compromise which paved the way to Sumter. After that, there is the Civil War and the start and sharp end of Reconstruction. But then the timeline continues. It moves through the grim heyday of the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth century, to the Civil Rights Movement, and ends, unflinchingly, in the 2020s. The final two events are the police murder of George Floyd and the successful referendum to change the Mississippi flag from its prior design, which featured the Confederate Battle device. To suggest that the former is a result, a ghost, or a lingering symptom of the Civil War and Reconstruction is not a new idea, but to have it placed at the front of a book like a Cambridge Companion is a very welcome first. Diffley and Hutchison have managed to turn their chronology—often a dry item, skippable by the more expert—into an argument, and a challenge, which the collection sustains: that this is a thoroughly contemporary response to a still contemporary war.